“Linking Individual and Community Economic Mobility: Life-Course Transitions in Chicago and Los Angeles.”

Robert J. SampsonHenry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative Harvard University

The talk will highlight a pair of coordinated follow-up studies in Chicago and Los Angeles that I recently carried out with Rob Mare at UCLA. I am currently working on several analyses that integrate a focus on neighborhood-level change in economic status with individual mobility, both residential and social (e.g., family, economic). In Chicago I am examining the transition from adolescence to young adulthood and in LA the course of middle adulthood. In both cases I am interested in how individual and contextual changes interact with race and the Great Recession. I will give an overview of the project and key results to date.